Political Economy-the great "savoir mourir"-is doing with them. Earth, Tisiphone-with the voice of your brother's blood crying out of it, in one wi The first three, I said, are Pure Air, Water, harmony round all its murderous sphere. and Earth. Heaven gives you the main elements of these. You can destroy them at your pleasure, or increase, almost without limit, the available quantities of them. 15 You can vitiate the air by your manner of life, and of death, to any extent. You might 10 easily vitiate it so as to bring such a pestilence on the globe as would end all of you. You or your fellows, German and French, are at present vitiating it to the best of your power in every direction;-chiefly at this moment with corpses, and animal and vegetable ruin in war: changing men, horses, and garden-stuff into noxious gas. But everywhere, and all day long, you are vitiating it with foul chemical exhalations; and the horrible nests, which you 20 call towns, are little more than laboratories for the distillation into leven of venomous smokes and smells, mixed with effluvia from decaying animal matter, and infectious miasmata from purulent disease. 25 On the other hand, your power of purifying the air, by dealing properly and swiftly with all substances in corruption; by absolutely forbidding noxious manufactures; and by planting in all soils the trees which cleanse and 30 invigorate earth and atmosphere,-is literally infinite. You might make every breath of air you draw, food. That is what you have done for the Thre 5 Material Useful Things. Then for the Three Immaterial Us: Things. For Admiration you have learner contempt and conceit. There is no lovething ever yet done by man that you care for or can understand; but you are persuaded the you are able to do much finer things yourselves. You gather and exhibit together, r if equally instructive, what is infinitely bad with what is infinitely good. You do not know which is which; you instinctively prefer the Bad, and do more of it. You instinctively hate the Good, and destroy it. Then secondly, for Hope. You have n so much spirit of it in you as to begin say plan which will not pay for ten years; nor se much intelligence of it in you, (either politicists or workmen), as to be able to form one eles idea of what you would like your country t become. Then, thirdly, for Love. You were orders by the Founder of your religion to love you" neighbour as yourselves. You have founded an entire science of Polical Economy, on what you have stated to be the constant instinct of man--the desire to de fraud his neighbour. And you have driven your women mad, s that they ask no more for Love, nor for fellowship with you; but stand against you, an Are there any of you who are tired of s this? Any of you, Landlords or Tenants Employers, or Workmen? Are there any Landlords-any masters.who would like better to be served by men that by iron devils? Secondly, your power over the rain and riverwaters of the earth is infinite. You can bring 35 ask for “justice." rain where you will, by planting wisely and tending carefully;-drought, where you will, by ravage of woods and neglect of the soil. You might have the rivers of England as pure as the crystal of the rock,-beautiful in falls, 40 in lakes, in living pools;-so full of fish that you might take them out with your hands instead of nets. Or you may do always as you have done now, turn every river of England into a common sewer, so that you cannot so 45 much as baptize an English baby but with filth, unless you hold its face out in the rain; and even that falls dirty. Then for the third, Earth,-meant to be nourishing for you, and blossoming. You 50 have learned, about it, that there is no such thing as a flower; and as far as your scientific hands and scientific brains, inventive of explosive and deathful, instead of blossoming and life-giving, Dust, can contrive, you have turned 55 the Mother-Earth, Demeter, into the Avenger Any tenants, any workmen, who can be true to their leaders and to each other? whe can vow to work and to live faithfully, for the sake of the joy of their homes? Will any such give the tenth of what they have; and of what they earn,-not to emigrate with, but to stay in England with; and d what is in their hands and hearts to make be a happy England? 4 One of the Furies, the "blood-avenger." Cf. Shakr speare, I Henry IV, Act I. sc. iii. "And it was great pity, so it was, Charles Kingsley 1819-1875 ST. GUTHLAC (From The Hermits, 1867) For there are islands in the sea which have escaped the destroying deluge of peat-moss,— out-crops of firm and fertile land, which in the early Middle Age were so many natural parks, 5 covered with richest grass and stateliest trees, swarming with deer and roe, goat and boar, as the streams around swarmed with otter and beaver, and with fowl of every feather, and fish of every scale. Hermits dwelling in the wilderness, as far is I am aware, were to be seen only in the northern and western parts of the island, where 10 not only did the forest afford concealment, out the crags and caves shelter. The southern and eastern English seldom possess the vivid magination of the Briton, the Northumbrian, and the Scot; while the rich lowlands of central, 15 the lovely isle, which got its name from the southern, and eastern England, well peopled and well tilled, offered few spots lonely enough for the hermit's cell. Beautiful after their kind were those far isles in the eyes of the monks who were the first settlers in the wilderness. The author of the "History of Ramsey," grows enthusiastic, and somewhat bombastic also, as he describes solitary ram which had wandered thither, either in extreme drought or over the winter ice, and never able to return, was found feeding among the wild deer, fat beyond the wont One district only was desolate enough to attract those who wished to be free from the 20 of rams. He tells of the stately ashes, most world, namely, the great fens north of Cambridge; and there, accordingly, as early as the seventh century, hermits settled in morasses now so utterly transformed that it is difficult to restore in one's imagination the original 25 scenery. The fens in the seventh century were probably very like the forests at the mouth of the Mississippi, or the swampy shores of the Carolinas. Their vast plain is now, in summer, 30 one sea of golden corn; in winter, a black dreary fallow, cut into squares by stagnant dykes, and broken only by unsightly pumping mills, and doleful lines of poplar trees. Of old it was a labyrinth of black wandering streams; 35 broad lagoons; morasses submerged every springtide; vast beds of reed and sedge and fern; vast copses of willow, alder, and gray poplar, rooted in the floating peat, which was swallowing up slowly, all-devouring, yet all-40 preserving, the forests of fir and oak, ash and poplar, hazel and yew, which had once grown on that low rank soil, sinking slowly (so geologists assure us) beneath the sea from age to age. Trees, torn down by flood and storm, 45 floated and lodged in rafts, damming the waters back upon the land. Streams, bewildered in the flats, changed their channels, mingling silt and sand with the peat-moss. Nature, of them cut in his time, to furnish mighty beams for the church roof; of the rich pastures painted with all gay flowers in spring; of the " green crown" or reed and alder which encircled the isle; of the fair wide mere (now drained) with its "sandy beach" along the forest side, "a delight," he says, "to all who look thereon." In like humour William of Malmesbury, writing in the first half of the twelfth century, speaks of Thorney Abbey" and its isle. "It represents," says he, "a very paradise; for that in pleasure and delight it resembles heaven itself. These marshes abound in trees, whose length, without a knot, doth emulate the stars. The plain there is as level as the sea, alluring the eye with its green grass, and so smooth that there is naught to trip the foot of him who runs through it. Neither is there any waste place; for in some parts are apples, in others vines, which are either spread on the ground, or raised on poles. A mutual strife there is between Nature and Art; so that what one produces not the other supplies. What shall I say of those fair buildings, which 'tis so wonderful to see the ground among those fens upbear?" So wrote William of Malmesbury, after the wisdom and industry of the monks, for more than four centuries, had been at work to civilize left to herself, ran into wild riot and chaos 50 and cultivate the wilderness. Yet even then more and more, till the whole fen became one "Dismal Swamp," in which at the time of the Norman Conquest, the "Last of the English," like Dred in Mrs. Stowe's tale, took refuge from their tyrants, and lived, like him, 55 a free and joyous life awhile. 1 In Mrs. Stowe's novel Dred, the hero, a runaway slave, lives in the Dismal Swamp. Hereward the Wake, one of the last to resist William the Conqueror. there was another side to the picture; and Thorney, Ramsey, or Crowland would have seemed, for nine months every year, sad places enough to us comfortable folk of the nineteenth century. But men lived hard in those days, even the most high-born, and luxurious nobles Ramsey Abbey, near Peterborough in the Fen Country. 4 V. p. 45, supra. Thorney Abbey and Crowland Abbey (mentioned later) are short distances from Peterborough. especial fondness for old heathen barrows wit: their fancied treasure-hoards; how they “flthe house with their coming, and poured in: every side, from above, and from benest 5 and everywhere. They were in counterar horrible, and they had great heads, and a kez neck, and a lean visage; they were filthy squalid in their beards, and they had roug ears, and crooked "nebs," and fierce eyes, and ladies; under dark skies, in houses which we should think, from darkness, draught, and want of space, unfit for felons' cells. Hardly they lived; and easily were they pleased; and thanked God for the least gleam of sunshine, the least patch of green, after the terrible and long winters of the Middle Ages. And ugly enough those winters must have been, what with snow and darkness, flood and ice, ague and rheumatism; while through the dreary 10 foul mouths; and their teeth were like borse winter's night the whistle of the wind and the wild cries of the waterfowl were translated into the howls of witches and demons; and (as in St. Guthlac's case) the delirious fancies of marsh fever made those fiends take hideous 15 their voices. . . . And they tugged and shapes before the inner eye, and act fantastic horrors round the fen-man's bed of sedge. Concerning this St. Guthlace full details remain, both in Latin and Anglo-Saxon; the tusks; and their throats were filled with flac and they were grating in their voice; they ha. crooked shanks, and knees big and great b hind, and distorted toes, and cried hoarsely him out of the cot, and led him to the sky fen, and threw and sunk him in the mud waters. After that they brought him into u wild places of the wilderness, among the th author of the original document professing to 20 beds of brambles that all his body was torn... be one Felix, a monk of Ramsey, near by, who wrote possibly as early as the eighth century. After that they took him and beat him with iron whips, and after that they brought h on their creaking wings between the cold re gions of the air." But there are gentler and more humer touches in that old legend. You may read it how all the wild birds of the fen came to Guthlac, and he fed them after their kin how the ravens tormented him, stealing lec ters, gloves, and what not, from his visitor and then, seized with compunction at b reproofs, brought them back, or hanged the on the reeds; and how, as Wilfred, a holy vis ant, was sitting with him, discoursing of the There we may read how the young warriornoble Guthlac (“The Battle-Play," the "Sport of War,") tired of slaying and sinning, be- 25 thought him to fulfil the prodigies seen at his birth; how he wandered into the fen, where one Tatwin (who after became a saint likewise) took him in his canoe to a spot so lonely as to be almost unknown, buried in reeds and alders 30 and how he found among the trees naught but an old "law," as the Scots still call a mound, which men of old had broken into, seeking for treasure, and a little pond; and how he built himself a hermit's cell thereon, and saw visions 35 contemplative life, two swallows came flyin and wrought miracles; and how men came to him, as to a fakir or shaman of the East; notably one Beccel, who acted as his servant; and how as Beccel was shaving the saint one day there fell on him a great temptation: 40 he who hath led his life according to Go in, and lifted up their song, sitting now on the saint's hand, now on his shoulder, now on hi knee; and how, when Wilfrid wondered theres! Guthlac made answer, "Know you not th will, to him the wild beasts and the wild bird draw the more near?" Why should he not cut St. Guthlac's throat, and instal himself in his cell, that he might have the honour and glory of sainthood? But St. Guthlac perceived the inward temptation (which is told with the naïve honesty of those 45 died. They buried him in a leaden coffin i half savage times), and rebuked the offender into confession, and all went well to the end. There we may read too a detailed account of the Fauna now happily extinct in the fens; of the creatures who used to hale St. Guthlac 50 out of his hut, drag him through the bogs, carry him aloft through frost and fire "Develin and luther gostes"-such as tormented in likewise St. Botolph (from whom BotulfstonBoston, has its name), and who were supposed 55 to haunt moors and fens, and to have an One of the early Saints of England (c. 673-714). A fakir is a religious mendicant, especially among the Mohammedans. A shaman is a medicine-man or sorcerer, found among rude tribes. After fifteen years of such a life, in fever ague, and starvation, no wonder St. Guthly grand and expensive luxury in the sever century) which had been sent to him during his life by a Saxon princess; and then over th sacred and wonder-working corpse, as of that of a Buddhist saint, there arose a chapel. with a community of monks, companies of pil grims who came to worship, sick who came be healed; till at last, founded on great pils driven into the bog, arose the lofty woode Abbey of Crowland; in "sanctuary of the four rivers," with its dykes, parks, vineyards. chards, rich ploughlands, from which in time of famine, the monks of Crowland fed all people of the neighbouring fens; with its tower with seven bells, which had not their like in England; its twelve altars rich with the gifts of the Danish vikings and princes, and even with twelve white bear-skins, the gift of Canute's self; while all around were the cottages of the corrodiers, or folk, who for corrody, or life pittance from the abbey, had given away their lands, to the wrong and detriment of their heirs. wooden abbey, destroyed by fire, was being replaced by that noble pile of stone whose ruins are still standing, the French Abbot of Crowland (so runs the legend) sent French 5 monks to open a school under the new French donjon, in the little Roman town of Grantebrigge; whereby-so does all earnest work, however mistaken, grow and spread in this world, infinitely and for ever-St. Guthlac, by But within those four rivers, at least, were 10 his canoe voyage into Crowland Island, beneither tyranny nor slavery. Those who took refuge in St. Guthlac's place from cruel lords must keep his peace toward each other, and earn their living like honest men, safe while came the spiritual father of the University of Cambridge in the old world; and therefore of her noble daughter, the University of Cambridge, in the new world, which fen-men sailing they so did: for between those four rivers 15 from Boston deeps colonized and Christianized St. Guthlac and his abbot were the only lords; 800 years after St. Guthlac's death. Matthew Arnold 1822-1888 THE GRAND STYLE (From On Translating Homer, 1861) So deeply seated is the difference between the ballad-manner and Homer's that even a man of the highest powers, even a man of the greatest vigour of spirit and of true genius,the Coryphæus1 of balladists, Sir Walter Scott, 30-fails with a manner of this kind to produce an effect at all like the effect of Homer. am not so rash," declares Mr. Newman, "as to say that if freedom be given to rhyme as in Walter Scott's poetry,"-Walter Scott, "by "I Does not all this sound like a voice from another planet? It is all gone; and it was good and right that it should go when it had 35 far the most Homeric of our poets," as in andone its work, and that the civilisation of the fen should be taken up and carried out by men like the good knight, Richard of Rulos, who two generations after the Conquest, marrying Hereward's granddaughter, and becoming 40 one; the moss-trooping Nestor reappears in the other place he calls him,-"a genius may not arise who will translate Homer into the melodies of Marmion." "The truly classical and the truly romantic," says Dr. Maginn, "are moss-trooping heroes of Percy's Reliques;" and a description by Scott, which he quotes, he calls "graphic, and therefore Homeric." He forgets our fourth axiom,-that Homer is Lord of Deeping (the deep meadow), thought that he could do the same work from the hall of Bourne as the monks did from their cloisters; got permission from the Crowland monks, for twenty marks of silver, to drain as 45 not only graphic; he is also noble, and has much as he could of the common marshes; and then shut out the Welland by strong dykes, built cottages, marked out gardens, and tilled fields, till "out of slough and bogs accursed, he made a garden of pleasure." Yet one lasting work those monks of Crowland seem to have done besides those firm dykes and rich cornlands of Porsand which endure unto this day. For within two generations of the Norman conquest, while the old 55 8 Cf. Song of Solomon, i. 14: "My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of En-gedi." The vineyards of En-gedi were watered by a spring, the region about being desolate, on the west shore of the Dead Sea. the grand style. Human nature under like circumstances is probably in all ages much the same; and so far it may be said that "the truly classical, and the truly romantic are one;" 50 but it is of little use to tell us this, because we know the human nature of other ages only through the representations of them which have come down to us, and the classical and romantic modes of representation are so far from being "one," that they remain eternally distinct, and have created for us a separation between the two worlds which they respectively 1 The leader and speaker of the chorus in Greek drama. The phrase is analogous to "prince of balladists." represent. Therefore to call Nestor the "moss- I suppose that when Scott is in what may be called full ballad swing, no one will hesitate to pronounce his manner neither Homeric nor the grand manner. When he says, for instance, "I do not rhyme to that dull elf3 15 20 and so on, any scholar will feel that this is not that is in the grand style. When Dante says: "Lascio lo fele, et vo pei dolci pomi Ma fino al centro pria convien ch' io tomi,” that is in the grand style. When Milton says:"His form had yet not lost All her original brightness, nor appeared that, finally is in the grand style. Now let any one, after repeating to himself these four pa sages, repeat again the passage of Scott, and he will perceive that there is something in style which the four first have in common, and which the last is without; and this something is precisely the grand manner. It is no d respect to Scott to say that he does not attain 30 to this manner in his poetry; to say so, is merely to say that he is not among the five or six supreme poets of the world. Among these he is not; but, being a man of far greater powers than the ballad-poets, he has tried to 35 give to their instrument a compass and sa elevation which it does not naturally possess, in order to enable him to come nearer to the effects of the instrument used by the great epic poets, an instrument which he felt be could not truly use, and in this attempt be has but imperfectly succeeded. The poetie style of Scott is-(it becomes necessary to say so when it is proposed to "translate Homer into the melodies of Marmion")—it is, tried by the highest standards, a bastard epic style: and that is why, out of his own powerful hands. it has had so little success. It is a less naiural, and therefore a less good style, than the original ballad style; while it shares with the ballad style the inherent incapacity of rising into the grand style, of adequately rendering Homer. Scott is certainly at his best in his That is, no doubt, as vigorous as possible, as The marauders between England and Scotland were * Marmion, c vi. 38. "Be content, good friend, die also thou! why h mentest thou thyself on this wise? Patroclus, too, died who was a far better than thou." Iliad, xxi. 106. "From me, young man, learn nobleness of soul and true effort: learn success from others." Eneid, xii. 435 7 "I leave the gall of bitterness, and I go for the apples of sweetness promised unto me by my faithful Guide but far as the centre it behooves me first to fall.” Hà. xvi. 61. |